The Bees Already Know How: Simple Queen Rearing

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Alex_Donohoe_with_queen_cells

Spring is the perfect time to make queens — the bees are already primed to do it. From simple queenless splits to a double-nuc cell builder that produces 20 quality cells per batch, here’s how to work with the bees rather than against them.
Whether you want to raise a handful of queens without grafting, turn a swarm-prone double-brood colony into two thriving units, or run a continuous cell-building system through the summer, there’s an approach here that suits your scale and ambition. The bees already know how to do this; your job is simply to set up the right conditions.
No specialist equipment required — just a nucleus box, good timing, and a willingness to let the bees do what they do best. Queen rearing is one of the most rewarding skills in beekeeping, and it is far more accessible than most beekeepers realise.

Don’t Overlook Honey Bee Nutrition

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honey bee on willow flower

How brief pollen shortages can weaken colonies weeks later I was going to write about the so-called “June gap” – a period between spring and summer when, at least in my area, the available forage for honey bees can dry up. However, the phenomenon can occur anytime, and it connects to apiary site selection, migratory … Read more

How to Recover from Colony Losses and Make Increase

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dry cracked earth due to lack of rain

Word has reached me through the beekeeping grapevine that colony losses this winter have been high, particularly in the South and East of England. Time will tell whether this plays out, but my information from certain sellers of queens and nucleus colonies seems to support that story. Pre-orders of queens and nucs are skyrocketing. My … Read more

The Cult Of Local Bees

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Map showing red line between UK and France

“Keep local bees.” Or, increasingly, “Keep locally adapted bees.” It’s among the most repeated lines in UK beekeeping, usually delivered with the confidence of a law of physics. And to be fair, it often works as advice. Local queens can perform well, and local colonies can overwinter reliably. But the phrase “local bees” is doing … Read more

Varroa Resistance In The UK

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cartoon drawing of two beekeepers and a nucleus colony

What the evidence shows, and what it doesn’t Since the late 1990s, varroa resistance has resurfaced repeatedly — Africanised bees, the Gotland survivors, hygienic breeding programmes, and more recently treatment-free narratives — each time framed as a solution, and each time constrained by ecology, genetics, and scale. Talks promise it, social media celebrates it, and … Read more